Quotes about absence
page 2

“Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

War, Peace, Justice, Confidence

“I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Feeling

“… in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“The absence of pain means death, so when something no longer bothers you, you've died to that thing.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Death, Pain

“And the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Source: Crush

“If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Variant: If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Happiness, Knowledge

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence.”

Michael Crichton book The Lost World

Source: The Lost World

“Being oppressed means the absence of choices”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

“I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 32, Shadow in the Throes of Death
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Context: First, about the mind. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That this is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

Love, Happiness, Hope, Loss

“In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Source: New Selected Poems

“But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Mine Till Midnight

Feeling, Tear

“I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”

Jodi Picoult book Keeping Faith

Variant: simply-quotes Follow

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.
Source: Keeping Faith

Thinking

“Indeed, the human mind appeared to suffer from a crippling need to fabricate in the absence of concrete proof.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Mine

Suffering, Appearance

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Time, Indifference, Forgetting

“I suppose now I'm obliged to wish you happiness in your new life. Although happiness in the absence of indoor plumbing is a debatable concept.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Mine Till Midnight

Life, Happiness

“Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it.”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Fear, Courage

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Imagination, Parent

“Absence feeds affection.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace

God, Feeling

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Mathematics, Time

“What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.”

John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic

Source: The Shape of a Pocket

Loss, Painting

“Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The day he moved out was terrible –
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.”

Wendy Cope (1945) British writer

Source: Serious Concerns

Hell, Problem

“Courage is not the absence of fear but the awareness that something else is more important.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Foreword to Prisoners of our Thoughts : Viktor Frankl's Principles at Work (2004), by Alex Pattakos, p. x
This statement has also been attributed to James Neil Hollingsworth (AKA: Ambrose Redmoon) in an article entitled "No Peaceful Warriors!" for Gnosis Magazine #21, in 1991.
Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Fear, Courage

“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

“Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.”

Julius Lester (1939–2018) American author

Source: The Autobiography of God

Silence

“When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Thinking, Parent, Hurt

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Waiting

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Fear, Understanding

“There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Love, Secret, Time

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“Free again, but it's just a feeling; freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit yourself to what is best for you.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Variant: Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit myself to - what is best for me.
Source: The Zahir

Feeling, Freedom

“Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Shamanism and the Archaic Revival http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1242

Life

“How often does a man ruin his disciples by remaining always with them! When men are once trained, it is essential that their leader leave them, for without his absence they cannot develop themselves. Plants always remain small under a big tree.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Men, Tree, Training

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.”

Clive Barker book The Hellbound Heart

Source: The Hellbound Heart

“These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Light

“You don't find happiness in the absence of problems. You find happiness in spite of problems.”

Andrew Matthews (1948) British writer

Source: Happiness Now!

Happiness, Problem

“His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief… Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Source: Golden Fool

Knowledge, Loss, Parting

“Absence, the highest form of presence.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.”

Meg Cabot The Princess Diaries

Source: The Princess Diaries

Fear, Courage

“We fell into silence, both of us keeping our own secrets of what we'd suffered in the other's absence. I wondered if we were trying to protect each other or simply didn't want to admit to our own fears and weaknesses.”

Richelle Mead book Silver Shadows

Source: Silver Shadows

Secret, Fear, Silence, Suffering

“I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Question, Problem, Personality

“The color white is the absence of memory.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Color, Memory

“Darkness is only light's absence.”

Andrew Clements Things That Are

Source: Things That Are

Light

“Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

Love

“Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.”

Jodi Picoult book Lone Wolf

Source: Lone Wolf

Wise

“Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something.”

Lisa Unger book Sliver of Truth

Source: Sliver of Truth

People, Thinking, Evil

“In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

Love

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Source: My Life on the Road

Women, Education, Study

“Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
David Bowie”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Life

“People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I think they’re wrong: Proximity makes the heart grow fonder.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

People, Thinking, Heart

“Love is quite violent. It is so painful at times, so devastating. And there is nothing worse or better. We find the highs and lows equally unbearable. But then again, the absence of them is more so.”

Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels

Love, Pain, Time

“Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Courage

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”

Wole Soyinka (1934) Nigerian writer

Source: The strong man syndrome https://www.thecable.ng/wole-soyinka-at-86/amp

Freedom

“In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die? No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

People, World, Suffering, Personality

“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Solitude

“Love is the absence of Anxiety.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Love

“In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Flowers

“It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill”

Franz Kafka book Amerika

Source: Amerika

“I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.”

Roland Barthes book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness. It means profusion of religions.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

Religion

“I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much… so, so much.”

Jacqueline Woodson (1963) American writer

Source: Maizon at Blue Hill

Death, Hope, Way, Star

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Time

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

Anaïs Nin book The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Death, Children, Pleasure, Books

“Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: On Peace

War, Peace, Justice, Law

“It’s not the parting or the absence that’s sad. You love them, and that’s why saying good-bye breaks your heart.”

Kyōichi Katayama (1959) Japanese writer

Source: Socrates In Love

Love, Sadness, Heart, Parting

“Joy was more than just an absence of discomfort.”

Brandon Sanderson Elantris

Source: Elantris

Joy

“This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Love, Hate

“Hell […] is the absence of God and the presence of Time.”

Glen Duncan book I, Lucifer

Source: I, Lucifer

God, Hell, Time

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Art

“This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.”

Roland Barthes book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Unfaithfulness, Forgetting

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

Death, Fear, Baby

“Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Peace

“Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Color, Sad

“What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.”

Sarah Kane book Crave

Source: Crave

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Love, Children, Hell

“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

The Simplest Way to be Happy (1933)

Life, Happiness

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”

Stacy Schiff (1961) American female Author, Pulitzer Prize winner

Source: Cleopatra: A Life

History

“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Love

“Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Peace, Sex

“Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.”

Steven Erikson (1959) Canadian fantasy author

“Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Source: Family - The Ties that Bind...And Gag!

Family, Season

“But what I found most interesting was that Aaron had apparently found a way to pass the time without her. Beside him, holding his hand, was a Moroi girl who looked about eleven but had to be older, unless he'd become a pedophile during our absence.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

Way, Girl, Time

“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Source: Crush

Star

“An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind….. Something incredibly important -.. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Life

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Tana French In the Woods

Misattributed
Source: In the Woods

“You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Pain, Sense, Hurt

“Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Source: Sula

“Women tend to love men in their presence, while men tend to love women in their absence.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart

Love, Women, Men

“You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.”

Isabel Allende book Daughter of Fortune

Source: Daughter of Fortune

Angels, Hell

“It's only a game if there is an absence of meaning. And we've already gone too far for that.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Game

“I mean she's Cleopatra… shouldn't she and Antony have known better? They were so different…"
"Variety is the spice of life"
"And from a thousand miles apart"
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Life, Heart

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

As quoted in "Special Section: They Are Fated to Succeed" in TIME magazine (2 January 1978) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915860,00.html <br class="br">1970s